What is population health? Apparently it depends on who you ask. If you ask those with a financial stake in the current health care delivery system, population health means improving the health of patients who currently use (i.e., pay for) the system. You get a different answer if you ask those involved in public health, community development, or social services. They believe “population” should include everyone in the entire geographic community, whether or not those individuals are able to use or benefit from health care services. They also believe “health” should include quality of life and economic well-being – measures that prevent disease in the first place – and not just conditions addressed by the medical model of disease.
Continue Reading »
Looking back, it’s now obvious that the Lalonde report did initiate a change in our fundamental understanding of the determinants of health – an understanding that is now beginning to flourish. By stressing the influence of non-medical factors on population health, the report made it possible for governments, academics, and foundations to endorse practices outside conventional medical care. Medical practitioners are equally aware that health care by itself cannot secure a population’s health. Following the Lalonde report, politicians, health merchants, and mass media moguls seized on the idea of healthy lifestyles. They tried to convince us that personal responsibility was the primary determinant of health. In the end, however, I am cautiously optimistic that it is not their voices that will prevail.
Continue Reading »
Collectively, increased health consciousness was followed by increased health care costs. The promotion of healthy lifestyles was not the only reason health consciousness increased in the late 20th century. And there were, of course, many other forces at work that increased the costs of health care. But it seems fair to say that the new perspective on health ended up providing opportunities to expand the demand for more medical services. Any hope that individual responsibility for healthy lifestyles would reduce costs – still touted today by some politicians and health care economists — turned out to be a mirage.
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Health & Medicine,
History of Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, history of medicine, inequality, lifestyle, neoliberalism, politics, social determinants of health0 Comments -
Leave a comment! -
In the 1970s, public health policies began to promote the idea that individuals are responsible for their health and therefore have an obligation to adopt healthy lifestyles. Over the ensuing decades, health became an especially popular topic for media coverage as well as a lucrative market for vendors of health-related products and services. What followed was a substantial increase in health consciousness and greater anxiety about all things that concern the body. Do healthy lifestyles produce better health? That they should may seem like common sense, which is one reason it’s been so easy to promote the idea. The question is difficult to answer with absolute certainty, however.
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Health & Medicine,
History of Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, history of medicine, inequality, lifestyle, neoliberalism, politics, social determinants of health0 Comments -
Leave a comment! -
By
Jan -
September 24, 2012
Why is it so hard to convince policy makers worldwide to address the social determinants of health, including poverty, hunger, and income inequality? Judging by the excerpt below, we shouldn’t count on the US to champion this cause any time soon. It’s from a document called “The Future We Want,” issued by the Rio+20 conference last June. The US requested changes to the document, indicated in bold (additions) and strike-outs (deletions).
Continue Reading »
I was initially attracted to the subject of healthism because I felt I’d been a victim of health messaging. But I was also attracted by a sense that something deeper was going on. I now see that the taken-for-granted – the questions that don’t get asked in media coverage of health issues or in the policy positions of governments — unites my blogging topics. In whose interest is neoliberalism? Medicalization? Conformity? Non-holistic medicine? The commercialization of health? Healthism? More often than not the answer is that it’s not in my interest. Nor is it in the interests of the society I want to live in. And that makes these topics personally meaningful to me.
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Health & Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: corporations, cosmetic surgery, disease mongering, doctor/patient relationship, health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, inequality, lifestyle, medicalization, neoliberalism, overdiagnosis, pharmaceuticals, politics, psychology & psychiatry, risk, social determinants of health1 Comment -
Leave a comment! -
~ Conformity and corporatism: Surgically altering one’s appearance (e.g., designer feet) presumably increases one’s chance of success in a society that commodifies bodies (i.e., in a society where salary, career advancement, social status and marriage prospects are influenced by appearance). Altering one’s personality with psychopharmaceuticals allows one to project the qualities necessary for success in a highly competitive society.
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Health & Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: corporations, cosmetic surgery, disease mongering, doctor/patient relationship, health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, inequality, lifestyle, medicalization, neoliberalism, overdiagnosis, pharmaceuticals, politics, psychology & psychiatry, risk, social determinants of health2 Comments -
Leave a comment! -
Social determinants of health (often abbreviated SDOH) refers to unequally distributed social and economic conditions that correlate with unequal and inequitable distributions of health and disease. Presumably there is a causal relationship between the two, not merely a correlation. Definitively identifying the causal mechanisms, however, is difficult. A great many things influence our health, including things we’re not even aware of yet, and it’s difficult to isolate and scientifically study the ones we can identify.
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Health & Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: corporations, cosmetic surgery, disease mongering, doctor/patient relationship, health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, inequality, lifestyle, medicalization, neoliberalism, overdiagnosis, pharmaceuticals, politics, psychology & psychiatry, risk, social determinants of health0 Comments -
Leave a comment! -
It’s always hard to be sure about these things, but I think the reason I decided to take a ‘sabbatical’ from blogging last July was that I was interested in too many seemingly unrelated topics. Writing about all of them left me feeling like I never got to the ‘meat’ of any one of them. And I couldn’t convince myself to focus on just one or two things, since that would mean abandoning the others, which I was unwilling to do.
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Health & Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: corporations, cosmetic surgery, disease mongering, doctor/patient relationship, health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, inequality, lifestyle, medicalization, neoliberalism, overdiagnosis, pharmaceuticals, politics, psychology & psychiatry, risk, social determinants of health2 Comments -
Leave a comment! -
Since the beginning of the industrial era, the unemployed have functioned as the reserve army of labor. They survived with the hope that someday they would surely be recalled from unemployment into active service. Today, however, the destination of those who become unemployed is the landfill of poverty and the psychological trash heap. As Danièle Linhart points out, “these men and women not only lose their jobs, their projects, their dreams and the assurance of a life under their control: they are also deprived of their dignity as workers, their self-esteem, their sense of purpose and their place in society.”
Continue Reading »
There are reasons, then, why health care might not become a campaign issue for this particular Republican presidential nominee. And if it does not, I wonder if those in favor of universal health care realize how easily we could lose this historic achievement.
Continue Reading »
By
Jan -
February 20, 2012
Our financially and professionally entrenched system of medical care has a vested interest in maintaining an understanding of health that preserves the status quo. Part of the power of our biomedical culture is that its contingency – the very real possibility that it could be different — is ordinarily invisible to us. What would it take to imagine a widely shared understanding of health that called for dramatic changes not only in how our health care needs are met, but in the conditions under which we live our lives? This is the question that I hope an examination of healthism will provoke.
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Aging Dying & Death,
Arts & Media,
Health & Medicine -
Tags: health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, history of medicine, inequality, lifestyle, medicalization, overdiagnosis, politics, social determinants of health2 Comments -
Leave a comment! -
By
Jan -
February 20, 2012
Throughout history there’s been an understandable desire to find connections between our behavior and our health. Human beings have practiced health regimens involving diet, exercise and hygiene since antiquity. When medicine was based on the humoral theory of disease, for example, individuals were advised to purge the body in the spring and, in the summer, avoid foods or activities that caused heat. Bathing in ice water was recommended in the 19th century. Mark Twain quoted the advice: “the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.”
Continue Reading »
Categories:
Health & Medicine,
History of Medicine,
Politics & Issues -
Tags: health care, healthism, healthy lifestyles, history of medicine, inequality, lifestyle, overdiagnosis, politics, social determinants of health9 Comments -
Leave a comment! -
By
Jan -
October 30, 2011
My real objection to medicine as a science is that by focusing on what can readily be quantified, it ignores what cannot, such as the social determinants of health and disease. Medicine’s desire for the respectability that comes with being a science gets in the way of determining what could actually make us healthier.
Continue Reading »
Will the London riots raise questions about a world that doesn’t care about the socially disadvantaged? Questions, yes. But will that be enough to bring about a change in attitudes and policies? Probably not. Unfortunately, the situation will need to get much worse. Even when that happens, current financial interests are likely to prevail. A discouraging prospect, yes, but a struggle worth waging.
Continue Reading »
Poverty in developed countries may never be overcome, simply because the rich no longer … need the poor to get rich. … The misfortune of being exploited has been succeeded by the still worse misfortune of no longer being exploitable.
Continue Reading »
